Perceptual experiences justify beliefs—that much seems obvious. As Brewer puts it, “sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs” (this volume, xx). In Mind and World McDowell argues that we can get from this apparent platitude to the controversial claim that perceptual experiences have conceptual content: [W]e can coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgement and belief, but only if we take it that spontaneity is already implicated in receptivity; that is, only if we take it that experiences have (...) conceptual content. (1994, 162) Brewer agrees. Their view is sometimes called conceptualism; nonconceptualism is the rival position, that experiences have nonconceptual content. One initial obstacle is understanding what the issue is. What is conceptual content, and how is it different from nonconceptual content? Section 1 of this paper explains two versions of each of the rival positions: state (non)conceptualism and content (non)conceptualism; the latter pair is the locus of the relevant dispute. Two prominent arguments for content nonconceptualism—the richness argument and the continuity argument—both fail (section 2). McDowell’s and Brewer’s epistemological defenses of content conceptualism are also faulty (section 3). Section 4 gives a more simple-minded case for conceptualism; finally, some reasons are given for rejecting the claim—on one natural interpretation—that experiences justify beliefs. (shrink)

Representationalists who hold that phenomenal character can be explained in terms of representational content currently cannot explain counter-examples that involve indeterminate perceptual content, such as in the case of objects seen blurrily by someone with poor eyesight, or objects seen vaguely in misty conditions. But this problem can be resolved via provision of a more sophisticated double content (DC) view, according to which the representational content of perception is structured in two nested levels. I start by outlining the DC view (...) via consideration of four closely related cases of perceptual imprecision. Then, after a demonstration that the DC view can also explain imprecise photographic content, inadequacies in the more standard single content (SC) view are demonstrated. The results are then generalized so as to apply to the content of any kinds of non-conventional representation. The paper continues with evidence that a DC account provides a moderate rather than extreme realist account of perception, and it concludes with an initial analysis of the failure of nomic covariance accounts of information in indeterminacy cases. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition. There was a healthy respect for the mind-body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domains were taken seriously. Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James. Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspired "fear of the mental", this development has been down-played (...) in historical work on early analytic philosophy. Such neglect assumes that the "linguistic turn" is a proper and permanent effect of twentieth-century philosophy, an assumption that distorts early analytic historiography, and begs a substantive philosophical question about thought and cognition. (shrink)

Fodor argues that our minds must have epistemic limitations because there must be endogenous constraints on the class of concepts we can acquire. However, his argument for the existence of these endogenous constraints is falsified by the phenomenon of the deferential acquisition of concepts. If we allow for the acquisition of concepts through deferring to experts and scientific instruments, then our conceptual capacity will be without endogenous constraints, and there will be no reason to think that our minds are epistemically (...) bounded. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis is undergoing a revival in philosophy, and much of the credit goes to Frank Jackson. Jackson argues that conceptual analysis is needed as an integral component of so-called serious metaphysics and that it also does explanatory work in accounting for such phenomena as categorization, meaning change, communication, and linguistic understanding. He even goes so far as to argue that opponents of conceptual analysis are implicitly committed to it in practice. We show that he is wrong on all of (...) these points and that his case for conceptual analysis doesn't succeed. At the same time, we argue that the sorts of intuitions that figure in conceptual analysis may still have a significant role to play in philosophy. So naturalists needn't disregard intuitions altogether. (shrink)

Christopher Peacocke has presented an original version of the perennial philosophical thesis that we can gain substantive metaphysical and epistemological insight from an analysis of our concepts. Peacocke's innovation is to look at how concepts are individuated by their possession conditions, which he believes can be specified in terms of conditions in which certain propositions containing those concepts are accepted. The ability to provide such insight is one of Peacocke's major arguments for his theory of concepts. I will critically examine (...) this "fruitfulness" argument by looking at one philosophical problem Peacocke uses his theory to solve and treats in depth. Peacocke (1999, 2001) defines what he calls the "Integration Challenge." The challenge is to integrate our metaphysics with our epistemology by showing that they are mutually acceptable. Peacocke's key conclusion is that the Integration Challenge can be met for "epistemically individuated concepts." A good theory of content, he believes, will close the apparent gap between an account of truth for any given subject matter and an overall account of knowledge. I shall argue that there are no epistemically individuated concepts, and shall critically analyze Peacocke's arguments for their existence. I will suggest more generally that the possession conditions of concepts and their principles of individuation shed little light on the epistemology or metaphysics of things other than concepts. My broader goal is to shed light on what concepts are by showing that they are more fundamental than the sorts of cognitive and epistemic factors a leading theory uses to define them. (shrink)

Prior to the twentieth century, theories of knowledge were inherently perceptual. Since then, developments in logic, statis- tics, and programming languages have inspired amodal theories that rest on principles fundamentally different from those underlying perception. In addition, perceptual approaches have become widely viewed as untenable because they are assumed to implement record- ing systems, not conceptual systems. A perceptual theory of knowledge is developed here in the context of current cognitive science and neuroscience. During perceptual experience, association areas in the (...) brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor areas to implement perceptual symbols. The stor- age and reactivation of perceptual symbols operates at the level of perceptual components – not at the level of holistic perceptual expe- riences. Through the use of selective attention, schematic representations of perceptual components are extracted from experience and stored in memory (e.g., individual memories of green, purr, hot). As memories of the same component become organized around a com- mon frame, they implement a simulator that produces limitless simulations of the component (e.g., simulations of purr). Not only do such simulators develop for aspects of sensory experience, they also develop for aspects of proprioception (e.g., lift, run) and introspec- tion (e.g., compare, memory, happy, hungry). Once established, these simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences. These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and ab- stract concepts, thereby implementing a fully functional conceptual system. Productivity results from integrating simulators combinato- rially and recursively to produce complex simulations. Propositions result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations. Abstract concepts are grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. Thus, a per- ceptual theory of knowledge can implement a fully functional conceptual system while avoiding problems associated with amodal sym- bol systems. Implications for cognition, neuroscience, evolution, development, and artificial intelligence are explored. (shrink)

The notion of a "mental representation" is, arguably, in the first instance a theoretical construct of cognitive science. As such, it is a basic concept of the Computational Theory of Mind, according to which cognitive states and processes are constituted by the occurrence, transformation and storage (in the mind/brain) of information-bearing structures (representations) of one kind or another.

Advocates of dynamic systems have suggested that higher mental processes are based on continuous representations. In order to evaluate this claim, we first define the concept of representation, and rigorously distinguish between discrete representations and continuous representations. We also explore two important bases of representational content. Then, we present seven arguments that discrete representations are necessary for any system that must discriminate between two or more states. It follows that higher mental processes require discrete representations. We also argue that discrete (...) representations are more influenced by conceptual role than continuous representations. We end by arguing that the presence of discrete representations in cognitive systems entails that computationalism (i.e., the view that the mind is a computational device) is true, and that cognitive science should embrace representational pluralism. (shrink)

Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by the philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher's word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives from the verb (...) intendere, which means being directed towards some goal or thing. The entry falls into eleven sections. (shrink)

Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands (...) semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts. (shrink)

One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a purely physical system could have states that represent or are about items in the world. The project is reductionist in spirit, the aim being to explain intentional relations—to say what they really are—and to do so in terms that do not themselves utilize intentional or semantic concepts. In this vein there are attempts to explain intentional relations in terms of causal relations, informational relations, teleological (...) or functional relations, relations involving abstract similarity or isomorphism, and various combinations thereof. What makes these accounts naturalistic is the presumed objectivity and scientific respectability of the properties appelated to in the explanans. What makes them all reductive is their shared presumption that intentionality can be explained in terms that have a wider application to intentional systems as well as to systems that have no mental properties at all. (shrink)

...the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives not from such relatively technical worries about individualism and holism as we.

In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it is (...) for one thing in nature, a bee dance (43), for example, to be about another, in this case, the location of a nectar source. My concern in this paper is to understand whether Millikan’s account of intentionality adequately explains how humans achieve reference, in language or thought, to individuals and groups in their environment. In bringing her theory of intentional content to bear on human activities, Millikan focuses largely on natural language. Thus, in what follows, I begin by laying out the biology-based principles that underlie Millikan’s theory of content, then proceed with an explanation of how the theory is to apply to natural language. As it appears, Millikan’s account of how content is determined for natural language terms and sentences rests on the determinacy of intentional content at the psychological level. This leads me to take a careful look at what Millikan says about the content of mental representations, in hopes of finding a sufficient basis there for the application of Millikan’s theory of content to natural language. Ultimately, I conclude that Millikan’s theory faces a problem of vacuity. If we approach the theory as a theory of intentional content, intended to explain the nature of reference, the theory is lacking in an extremely important respect: Millikan explains how it could be one of the biological functions of a mental or natural language term to refer, without telling us precisely what in the natural order constitutes the reference relation.. (shrink)

This is a critique of Lloyd's theory which appeared in his book, Simple Minds.

The Representational Theory of the Mind allows for psychological explanations couched in terms of the contents of propositional attitudes. Propositional attitudes themselves are taken to be relations to mental representations. These representations (partially) determine the contents of the attitudes in which they figure. Thus, Representationalism owes an explanation of the contents of mental representations. This essay constitutes an atomistic theory of the content of formally or syntactically simple mental representation, proposing that the content of such a representation is determined by (...) the intersection of the representation's correlational and control properties. The theory is distinguished from standard information-based accounts of mental content in allowing that the relevant correlations be contingent while insisting on an efferent aspect to mental content. The theory on offer allows for a natural explanation of misrepresentation, finds a niche for the notion of narrow content, welcomes radical first person fallibility with respect to questions of content, admits of mental ambiguity and recognizes that the future of a psychological agent is a factor in determining the content of the agent's present psychological states. (shrink)

This article responds to two unresolved and crucial problems of cognitive science: (1) What is actually accomplished by functions of the nervous system that we ordinarily describe in the intentional idiom? and (2) What makes the information processing involved in these functions semantic? It is argued that, contrary to the assumptions of many cognitive theorists, the computational approach does not provide coherent answers to these problems, and that a more promising start would be to fall back on mathematical communication theory (...) and, with the help of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology, to attempt a characterization of the adaptive processes involved in visual perception. Visual representations are explained as patterns of cortical activity that are enabled to focus on objects in the changing visual environment by constantly adjusting to maintain levels of mutual information between pattern and object that are adequate for continuing perceptual control. In these terms, the answer proposed to (1) is that the intentional functions of vision are those involved in the establishment and maintenance of such representations, and to (2) that semantic features are added to the information processes of vision with the focus on objects that these representations accomplish. The article concludes with proposals for extending this account of intentionality to the higher domains of conceptualization and reason, and with speculation about how semantic information-processing might be achieved in mechanical systems. (shrink)

The influence of historical-causal theories of reference developed in the late sixties and early seventies by Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Devitt has been so strong that any semantic theory that has the consequence of assigning disjunctive representational content to the mental states of twins (e.g. [H2O or XYZ]) has been thereby taken to refute itself. Similarly, despite the strength of pre-theoretical intuitions that exact physical replicas like Davidson's Swampman have representational mental states, people have routinely denied that they have any (...) intentional/representational states. I want to focus on a particular brand of causal theory that is not historical, the so-called pure informational or nomic covariance theories, and examine how they propose to handle twin cases and replicas like Swampman. In particular, I will take up Fodor. (shrink)

We offer a novel theory of information that differs from traditional accounts in two respects: (i) it explains information in terms of counterfactuals rather than conditional probabilities, and (ii) it does not make essential reference to doxastic states of subjects, and consequently allows for the sort of objective, reductive explanations of various notions in epistemology and philosophy of mind that many have wanted from an account of information.

Externalism about the mind holds that the explanation of our representational capacities requires appeal to mental states that are individuated by reference to features of the environment. Externalists claim that ‘narrow’ taxonomies cannot account for important features of psychological explanation. I argue that this claim is false, and offer a general argument for preferring narrow taxonomies in psychology.

Various systems that learn are examined to show how content is carried in connections installed by a learning history. Agents do not explicitly use the content of such states in practical reasoning, yet the content plays an important role in explaining behavior, and the physical state carrying that content plays a role in causing behavior, given other occurrent beliefs and desires. This leads to an understanding of the environmental reasons which are the determinate content of these states, and leads to (...) a better grasp of how representational content can be carried by systems without an explicit representation. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that being in an intentional state is a matter of being related to a sentence in a mental language-a 'Language of Thought' (see especially Fodor 1975, 1987 Appendix; Field 1978). According to this view-which I shall call 'the LT hypothesis'-when anyone has a belief or a desire or a hope with a certain content, they have a sentence of this language, with that content, 'written' in their heads. The claim is meant quite literally: the mental representations that (...) make up the items of this language have semantic and syntactic properties. This is why, according to this view, cognitive psychology does, and should, treat that part of the mind which deals with intentional states as a semantic and a syntactic 'engine'. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in (...) syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

There are both externalist and internalist theories of the phenomenal content of conscious experiences. Externalists like Dretske and Tye treat the phenomenal content of conscious states as representations of external properties. Internalists think that phenomenal conscious states are reducible to electrochemical states of the brain in the style of the type-type identity theory. In this paper, we side with the representationalists and visit a dispute between them over the test case of Swampman. Does Swampman have conscious phenomenal states or not? (...) Dretske and Tye disagree on this issue. We try to settle the dispute in favor of Dretske's theory. (shrink)

It is often assumed thatconsciousness and intentionality are twomutually independent aspects of mental life.When the assumption is denounced, it usuallygives way to the claim that consciousness issomehow dependent upon intentionality. Thepossibility that intentionality may bedependent upon consciousness is rarelyentertained. Recently, however, John Searle andColin McGinn have argued for just suchdependence. In this paper, I reconstruct andevaluate their argumentation. I am in sympathyboth with their view and with the lines ofargument they employ in its defense. UnlikeSearle and McGinn, however, I am (...) quite attachedto a naturalist approach to intentionality. Itwill turn out to be somewhat difficult toreconcile naturalism with the notion thatintentionality is dependent upon consciousness,although, perhaps surprisingly, I will arguethat McGinn's case for such dependence iscompatible with naturalism. (shrink)

Objections to Searle's argument for the Connection Principle and its consequences (Searle 1990a) fall roughly into three categories: (1) those that focus on problems with the _argument_ for the Connection Principle; (2) those that focus on problems in understanding the _conclusion_ of this argument; (3) those that focus on whether the conclusion has the _consequences_ Searle claims for it. I think the Connection Principle is both true and important, but I do not think that Searle's argument establishes it. The problem (...) with the argument is that it either begs the question or proves too much. (shrink)

Cognitive science typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena, computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The essential point is that (...) intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape: Our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects, and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being the state that it is. (shrink)

. When I have a conscious experience of the sky, there is a bluish way it is like for me to have that experience. We may distinguish two aspects of this "bluish way it is like for me": the bluish aspect and the for-me aspect. Let us call the bluish aspect of the experience its qualitative character and the for-me aspect its subjective character . What is this elusive for-me-ness, or subjective character , of conscious experience? In this paper, I (...) examine six different attempts to account for subjective character in terms of the functional and representational properties of conscious experiences. After arguing against the first five, I defend the sixth. (shrink)

In Section 5 of his interesting article, Goldman suggests that the consideration of imaginary cases can be valuable in the analysis of our psychological concepts. In particular, he argues that we can imagine a system that is isomorphic to us under any functional description, but which lacks qualitative mental states, such as pains and color sensations. Whether or not such a being is empirically possible, it certainly seems to be logically possible, or conceptually coherent. Goldman argues from this possibility to (...) the conclusion that our concepts of qualitative mental states cannot be analyzed entirely in functional terms. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds of rule have (...) divergent forms, occupying opposite poles on a spectrum of naturalness. Symbolic rules are composed entirely of primitive juxtapositions of sign types with contents, while iconic rules determine contents entirely by uniform natural relations with sign types. This distinction is marked explicitly in the formal semantics of familiar sign systems, both for atomic first-order representations, like words, pixel colors, and dials, and for complex second-order representations, like sentences, diagrams, and pictures. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

This work presents a nuanced understanding of broader perception and cognition by examining functional relations, physical dependence, and temporal range. These concepts contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of perception and its connection to external stimuli.

Although a substantial number of papers is published on the topic of consciousness, there is still little consensus on what its nature is and how the physical and phenomenal worlds are connected. Most published research establishes a causal relation between the brain and the mind, but it lacks a cogent theory of how this relation comes to be. In contrast, this paper uses a set of thought experiments grounded in quantum information theory to derive a framework for resolving the hard (...) problem of consciousness. Despite the common tendency to treat the problem purely philosophically, in this paper, consciousness and qualia are analyzed through established formal theory deriving conclusions regarding their relation which provide counter-arguments for the commonly held dualist view. Through the informational monism framework, a case is made for a fundamentally phenomenal nature of information. (shrink)

This paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to an intuitive picture of the roles that representational mental states play in our mental lives, however, these states play the roles they do partly (...) because they have the contents that they do. Since explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric (call this principle ‘the Euthyphro Principle’), we can’t accept both this intuitive picture and a functionalist metasemantics. Hence, we should reject all versions of the latter. This paper can be seen as an attempt to better articulate an intuition that has been suggested in various forms in the literature. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it shows that functionalist metasemantic views imply certain ‘partly because’ claims. Second, it argues for the Euthyphro Principle. Third, it defends the intuitive picture of representational mental states and shows that it implies ‘partly because’ claims that conflict with those made by functionalist metasemantic views. Finally, it considers ways of relaxing the intuitive picture and finds them all wanting. (shrink)

Abstracting away from its various particular versions, contemporary externalism about knowledge can be broadly characterized as the rejection of two central ideas: that knowledge is incompatible with reflective awareness of the possibility of error, and that knowledge is necessarily tied to the resources that are available from within the first-person perspective. In this brief introduction, I outline five distinctly externalist accounts of knowledge, and two distinctly externalist methodological approaches to knowledge, all fitting this general description.

The longstanding species problem in biology has a history that suggests a solution, and that history is not the received history found in many texts written by biologists or philosophers. The notion of species as the division into subordinate groups of any generic predicate was the staple of logic from Aristotle through the middle ages until quite recently. However, the biological species concept during the same period was at first subtly and then overtly different. Unlike the logic sense, which relied (...) on definitions of the essence of both genus and species, biological species from the time of Epicurus were consistently considered to involve a reproductive element: in short, living species relied not on essential definitions, but on the generative cause, which might not be definable. I term this the generative conception of species: species were the generation by reproduction of form. This undercuts the claim that species before Darwin were essentialist, and divorces the notion of a type from that of essence. In fact, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, logicians explicitly treated biological “species” as a homonym only of logical essentialist species, and permitted considerable deviation from the type or form. At every point, species in logic were thought to be a subset, in effect, of some more general notion. I sketch a history of both philosophical and biological traditions of the species concept, before turning to the current conceptions. These are reconsidered in the light of this history, and in particular Mayr’s changing views are shown to be somewhat Whiggish, historiographically. Of the many touted biological species concepts, only one of which (Mayr’s) is called _the_ Biological Species Concept, none appears to capture all the relevant facts, intuitions, and operational requirements of biology. Cladistic conceptions, however, have much in common with the older philosophical literature, in that the natural group of cladism is the clade, or monophyletic group. After considering the Individuality Thesis, and the metaphysics of species, we see that species are the most particular terminal taxa in a clade, and that they are “defined” in terms of the particular synapomorphies, or evolved characters, that are causally responsible for keeping the lineages that organisms form distinct from one another. In this way, we can remain within the generative conception of species that has been in play for over two millennia, and yet avoid the pitfalls of prior attempts to find a universal conception of species. (shrink)

It seems like experience plays a positive—even essential—role in generating some knowledge. The problem is, it’s not clear what that role is. To see this, suppose that when your visual system takes in information about the world around you it skips the experience step and just automatically and immediately generates beliefs in you about your surroundings. A lot of philosophers think that, in such a case, you would (or at least could) still know, via perception, about the world around you. (...) But then that raises the question: What epistemic role was the experience playing? How did it contribute to your knowledge of your surroundings? Philosophers have given many different answers to these questions. But, for various reasons, none of them has really stuck. In this paper I offer and defend a different answer to these questions—a solution to the problem—which avoids the pitfalls of other answers. I argue that experience is, all by itself, a kind of knowledge—it’s what Bertrand Russell (1912) calls “knowledge of things”. So I argue that experience helps generate knowledge simply by being knowledge. (shrink)

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, (...) and history and philosophy of science and religion. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

The Problem of Perception is a pervasive and traditional problem about our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. The problem is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perceptual experience be what we ordinarily understand it to be: something that enables direct perception of the world? These possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience; the major theories of experience are responses to this challenge.

According to Anscombe, acting intentionally entails knowledge in ac- tion. This thesis has been near-universally rejected due to a well-known counter- example by Davidson: a man intending to make ten legible carbon copies might not believe with confidence, and hence not know, that he will succeed. If he does, however, his action surely counts as intentional. Damaging as it seems, an even more powerful objection can be levelled against Anscombe: while act- ing, there is as yet no fact of the (...) matter as to whether the agent will succeed. Since his belief that he will is not yet true while his action is in progress, he can- not possibly know that he is indeed bringing about the intended goal. Knowl- edge in action is not only unnecessary for intentional action, it seems, but–at least as regards success-bound types of action–impossible to attain in the first place. -/- In this paper I argue that traditional strategies to counter these objections are unsatisfactory and propose a new account of knowledge in action which has two core features: (i) It invokes an externalist conception of justification which not only meets Davidson’s challenge, but also casts doubts on the tacit internalist premise on which his example relies. (ii) Drawing on recent work about by John MacFarlane, the proposed account conceives of claims to in action as assessment-sensitive so as to overcome the factivity objection. From a retrospective point of evaluation, previous claims about future events and actions can not only be deemed as having been true, but also as having been known. (shrink)

The causal and simulation theories are often presented as very distinct views about declarative memory, their major difference lying on the causal condition. The causal theory states that remembering involves an accurate representation causally connected to an earlier experience. In the simulation theory, remembering involves an accurate representation generated by a reliable memory process. I investigate how to construe detailed versions of these theories that correctly classify memory errors as misremembering or confabulation. Neither causalists nor simulationists have paid attention to (...) memory-conjunction errors, which is unfortunate because both theories have problems with these cases. The source of the difficulty is the background assumption that an act of remembering has one target. I fix these theories for those cases. The resulting versions are closely related when implemented using tools of information theory, differing only on how memory transmits information about the past. The implementation provides us with insights about the distinction between confabulatory and non-confabulatory memory, where memory-conjunction errors have a privileged position. (shrink)

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

A Série Investigação Filosófica é uma série de livros de traduções de verbetes da Enciclopédia de Filosofia da Stanford (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) e de outras plataformas internacionalmente reconhecidas, que intenciona servir tanto como material didático para os professores das diferentes sub-áreas e níveis da Filosofia quanto como material de estudo para a pesquisa e para concursos da área. Nós, professores, sabemos o quão difícil é encontrar bom material em português para indicarmos. E há uma certa deficiência na graduação brasileira (...) de filosofia, principalmente em localizações menos favorecidas, com relação ao conhecimento de outras línguas, como o inglês e o francês. Tentamos, então, suprir essa deficiência, ao introduzirmos essas traduções ao público de língua portuguesa, sem nenhuma finalidade comercial e meramente pela glória da filosofia. (shrink)

Dr. Laszlo’s hypothesis (2009) is in my opinion appealing on many levels. He proposes that phenomena of apparent transpersonal communication between human beings are due to the intermediary of information-carrying holograms in the reactive quantum vacuum produced by human brain activity. He also suggests that valid information regarding the world in general is available through the same mechanism, on the grounds that all material objects “excite the ground state of the [zero point] fi eld” and produce further such holograms. On (...) this hypothesis we are literally immersed in a sea of information, with the capacity for accessing that information as well as producing more of it by our own thought processes. (shrink)

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for example, (...) consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects. (shrink)